Al Jazeera Links to 9/11 Truth Web Site

It's about time.

Iranian President Ahmadinejad's comments at the UN raised the issue of US government involvement in the attacks. An Al Jazeera article covering these remarks included a section with the title 'Alternative Perspectives." The segment included the following:

The most popular website on so-called alternative views on the September 11, 2001, attacks seems to be 911truth.org. The site acts as a clearing house for an array of various views and refuses to articulate an exact position on who it believes launched the attacks and why. Rather, it poses a series of questions, while offering readers the "Top 40 Reasons to Doubt the Official Story".

A "documentary" called Loose Change questioning the official 9/11 narrative, has been popular among activist groups and other more traditional doubters.

"That 19 hijackers are going to completely bypass security and crash four commercial airliners in a span of two hours, with no interruption from the military forces, in the most guarded airspace in the United States and the world? That to me is a conspiracy theory," Korey Rowe, the film's director, told Time magazine.

Mainstream media in the West, and even the US government itself, have felt a need to respond to these theories. The US state department's Bureau of International Information Programs has a website devoted to debunking the "top September 11 conspiracy theories".

In a piece titled "Why the 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Won't Go Away", Time argues that what many would call conspiracy theories are "not a fringe phenomenon".

'Planned demolition'

Some of the more unconventional claims include that the twin towers did not collapse from the impact of two Boeing 767s and the petrol stored in their tanks. Rather, the buildings collapsed in a planned, controlled demolition - perhaps through explosions in the basement.

Another popular theory is that a missile fired by elements from within the US government hit the Pentagon, rather than an aircraft. Some of the "alternative" or "conspiratorial" views come from people who seem like serious scholars."

Questioning the official story of 9/11 is an act of responsible citizenship.

We all know the official story of September 11th: four jetliners were hijacked by groups of four and five Arabic men armed with box cutters, who proceeded to fly three of the four jets into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

Subsequently the World Trade Center Towers, weakened by the impacts and fires, collapsed into piles of rubble. The FBI had compiled a list of hijackers within three days, and it was so obvious that Osama bin Laden had masterminded the operation from caves in Afghanistan, that there was no need to seriously investigate the crime or produce evidence. The "retaliatory" attack on the Taliban would soon commence.

Is this story true?

We don't think so.

Its central assumptions have never been tested by an official government body whose members lack obvious conflicts of interest. There are numerous red flags in the official story, which requires a long series of highly improbable coincidences.